


effusive, hyaline, mychorrizal

by Stacicity



Series: Jonah Fics [6]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: An AU in which Jonah Magnus is got by the Corruption before he's got by the Eye, Canon-Typical Horror, M/M, Multi, POV: you are jonathan fanshawe and you're having a very odd time of it, Unhealthy Relationships, another one of those jonah magnus mushroom fics, body horror out the wazoo, please do read the warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:15:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27024130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stacicity/pseuds/Stacicity
Summary: Jonah tells you about dark forests and humid swamps and the miles of hard-frozen land, and the things that live there, the cycle of life and decay and rot, the everlasting life that is to be born in something long-dead. The odd joy of feeling life bloom in his veins and his lungs, his body made a sanctuary, his voice becoming one of many that thrum through each cell, each breath. Becoming multitudinous, becoming full, each part of him made useful and beautiful.--Jonah Magnus goes travelling in search of  knowledge, and comes back with much more than he intended.
Relationships: Barnabas Bennett/Jonah Magnus, Barnabas Bennett/Jonathan Fanshawe
Series: Jonah Fics [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1759540
Comments: 11
Kudos: 27
Collections: Associated Articles Regarding One Jonah Magnus





	effusive, hyaline, mychorrizal

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings for this fic** : Corruption-typical body horror, gaslighting, toxic & abusive relationship dynamics, TMA levels of horror 
> 
> As per my other Jonah fics, Simon Fairchild's name in the Regency era was Emiliano Miniati and he's referred to thusly (though he's only around for a brief time)
> 
> A million thanks to Leto for a spectacular beta-read, you're a treasure 
> 
> And thanks to Cat as well for writing [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25377556) which is quite rightly spawning a wave of mycological TMA content, and 100% worth a read

_"Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche_

* * * 

You wake with the dawn, a pale wash of grey across the bare walls of your room. It’s a habit forced upon you by midnight calls and early-morning surgeries; you snatch your sleep where you can, but it has never come easily to you. Each moment of peace seems wrestled for and hard-won, clawed from a life that would have you alert and watching at all hours, readied and primed for what the world may demand of you next. And yet each morning, awake as you are—and you know, from bitter experience, that rolling over and burying your face in the pillow again will bring you nothing but frustration—sleep clings sand-like to you, weighting your eyelids. 

No matter. It is easily washed away by a splash of cold water from the basin in your room. They are spartan, the surroundings in which you live, partly by necessity and partly by design. You do not have the finances required for lush velvet and brocade curtains, but nor do you have the appetite for luxury that’s shared by some of your fellows. So you tell yourself. Sometimes you wonder whether it’s just your own obstinacy making you turn your face against that which you couldn’t accomplish even if you wanted to. You have always been stubborn. 

As it is, you hold to simple pleasures. Tea brewed on the stovetop, the shriek of the kettle cutting across your thoughts as you pull your finger down the line of appointments for the day. The usual morning surgery, two or three hours for the weary and wounded to pull themselves to your door. Pills and prescriptions and liniments, caution against the oncoming winter and against overindulgence. Then rounds, to the houses of those who cannot walk for your assistance, changing dressings and soothing fevers and listening for a soft heartbeat within a womb. Tiny thumps of a life determined to live—even now, it awes you. 

After that, there are further appointments at the homes of the rich that will pay handsomely to have you come to their doors or their rooms, to tend things that they do not wish to air in the more public forum of the surgery. And then, as required, surgery itself: bone saws and clamps and a leather bit to stop those prone to screaming from swallowing their own tongues. It is messy but necessary, and even if you swear that sometimes you can still smell the salt of blood against your palms, the lives you save are surely worth the effort: the shrieking, the wrench of bones, the overwhelming gristly noise of it all.

Suffice it to say that there is rarely time in your day for reflection. Most days you drag yourself from the surgery and content yourself with an hour or two of reading by candlelight over supper, or answering the letters that arrive at your door, but every so often—even with your lists of patients piling up, and the work never done, and the bleeding never staunched—society makes its demands on you. And tonight, Jonah is returning home. 

You cannot guess at what drove Jonah from the chilly cobbled streets of London and Edinburgh, grimy and glittering and familiar, out into the vast expanse of the world and towards the wonders about which he has written to you. Fastidious man that he is, you are hard-pressed to imagine him perspiring and tramping through swamps and snowdrifts, avoiding snakes and spiders and illnesses and whatever other evils may encounter him there. You only know that whatever it was that caught his interest it had him all but flying from this cold little island onto the first boat that would take him, eyes fixed upon the horizon and gleaming with excitement. For a man that can affect such easy nonchalance about so many things that would frenzy the blood of any other, he can be single-mindedly focused, and whilst he has spent all the years of your acquaintance pulling the strings of society and forging himself a secure and glittering nest and an unimpeachable reputation, he has abandoned it for six months to chase whatever he hopes to find in the wilderness. 

There is a luxury, you think, in being as magpie-minded as Jonah. You are mired in the concerns of the world around you, pedestrian as they may be. For every grand ideal about knowledge or Society (the capital S implicit in the weight Jonah gives the word—a respect he hardly pays to anything or anyone else)—there is a broken ankle or a grazed knee or a case of gout to pull you sharply back to Earth. You have knowledge, yes—hard-won, hard-earned—but now that you have obtained it, you have a duty to use it, and that thought anchors you right here. You have obligations. 

Perhaps that’s the difference between your pursuit of knowledge and Jonah’s. If Jonah has an intended use for his knowledge he is sparing with it, hoarding his tidbits like a dragon with his hoard. He collects secrets like artefacts, and keeps them just as tightly sealed behind glass. He is always alert to new gossip, and he rarely shares anything he hears, and his only obligations—it seems—are to himself. 

Even so, you are sure that tonight there will be no shortage of stories, though you are equally sure that you’ll never quite know what sent Jonah hastening across the globe. A few thousand miles by sea are nothing. Bellerophon tried to fly a wingèd horse to Olympus to meet the gods; you think that in the absence of a horse, Jonah would grit his teeth and claw his way there with ragged, bleeding fingernails, if he felt it necessary. 

When the evening arrives and you are ushered into Robert Smirke’s living room, you’re dressed in your finery—inasmuch as you own finery, and the fabric feels odd at your shoulders and the back of your neck. Perhaps you’ve lost weight again. Perhaps you are just far more at home in your surgical apron. Perhaps you have the heavy load of a reunion upon your shoulders—there is always such _doubt_ in reunions. Social bonds and warm feelings cannot be taken for granted, and you are not sure you have ever believed that old maxim, _absence makes the heart grow fonder_. Absence makes the hand grow heavy at the page, makes the mind go distant and uneasy. Absence breeds anxieties, breeds apathy. 

If Barnabas Bennett feels any such anxieties, he doesn’t show them. He is resplendent tonight, a flush in his cheeks against the pale grey of his waistcoat, the same subtle embroidery that you spotted in the lining of Mordechai’s coat when he handed it to a servant. Perhaps they only share a tailor. But then, so much more is shared between your little fellowship than contacts and conveniences, and so you find that hard to believe. Whatever is shared between them has been laid aside tonight, as every few seconds Barnabas’ eyes steal to the door and his tongue trips over even the most trivial of small-talk, losing its way as his mind drifts back to his lodestone. 

Well, good. You’d be the first to admit that you have not kept quite as close an eye on Barnabas as you might like in Jonah’s absence, and perhaps you should have. He is taller than you, taller than Jonah, taller than Emiliano, and yet something about him can feel so insubstantial, like he might just slip through your fingers, crumble against you like rotted wood, yielding to your palm. Without Jonah to keep him steady, it would be easy for him to fall under other influences. 

But you are busy. You are always busy. And for all of your warm feelings and good intentions, the snap of a bone or the mottling spread of a bruise is more urgent and more immediate than Barnabas’ smile growing distant and his hand growing cooler against yours. 

He’s not cold tonight. The door opens, Jonah’s lilting step echoes in the hallway, and Barnabas leaps to his feet to abandon the card game he’s been steadily losing at for the last half-hour, rushing to greet Jonah in the doorway to the sitting room and clasping his hands. 

No more than that. You think that that is odd, having seen those two in far more intimate gestures than hands pressed close, no matter how enthusiastically, but there’s a hesitance there, in the way that Jonah stands and watches Barnabas and waits a beat—two—before his face splits to a smile and he tilts his head obligingly for a kiss, a monarch accepting tribute duly-given. 

In the corner, setting down his own cards, Mordechai chuckles, low and rumbling, creaking like the trunk of a great oak mere moments from snapping. 

“Your hair’s grown,” Barnabas says wonderingly, reaching to the ribbon tying Jonah’s curls neatly back, and his beautiful face pinches with swift irritation. You watch the panic flicker over Barnabas’ face, a man stepping out into the empty air and falling, falling—but just as quickly Jonah’s expression clears and he shrugs, easy and nonchalant. 

“The Bahia mangroves and Siberian steppe have a shortage of good barbers. It’ll be cut tomorrow.” 

“Oh—must you?” Barnabas murmurs. “It suits you very much.” 

Jonah does smile at that, a quick twitch of his lips as he catches Barnabas’ hand again to keep him from untying the ribbon, squeezing his fingers and reaching up in turn to adjust his cravat, skimming his fingertips over that silvered embroidery. His eyes find Mordechai’s, though you don’t wish to draw your attention to your recognition of the fact by turning to see what Mordechai’s expression is. That’s another relationship that you cannot understand. 

“It’ll be cut tomorrow,” Jonah replies firmly, stepping around Barnabas to greet you with a kiss to the cheek that you feel lingering like a stain over your skin, like a coating of soot from Ash Wednesday, like a benediction. Robert gets an embrace—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he _takes_ one, as Jonah bears it with a curl of his lip and the affronted posture of a picked-up cat—and Mordechai reaches for a _handshake_ of all things. The two of them look so solemn as they shake hands like businessmen that you have to stifle a laugh you feel obstructing your chest, clearing it with a sip of brandy and reaching for Barnabas who stands in the middle of the room as if he’s lost without Jonah to guide him. 

Has he always been so uneasy, so lopsided? Sometimes Jonah strikes you as the type of little boy to have pulled the wings from flies. Sometimes you wonder whether he hasn’t tugged one of Barnabas’ wings free to watch him lurch in helpless, drooping circles around his head, just to fill a lazy afternoon. The thought ought to make you terrified; it ought to make you furious. You put your numbness down to a long and wearisome day and draw Barnabas against your side, leaning into his warmth and painting on an indulgent smile.

“Go on, then. Tell us all about your mangrove swamps.” 

Jonah needs no encouragement. He is not a natural storyteller, it turns out—he finds tangents and grips them like he’s trying to unspool a tapestry thread by thread—but he describes wonderfully, painting a picture of lush greenery and plants the size of people, leaves large enough for a full-grown man to sit upon, flowers in orange and pink and purple that contain nectars or poisons beyond all of your medical imaginings. Jonah has seen long-furred apes bathing like men in steaming natural pools, has watched bears prowl in dark boreal forests, has narrowly saved his journal from being used to kill a spider reputed to hunt and eat birds—

You don’t think you imagine the look of distaste on Mordechai’s face at that, and there’s another laugh bubbling and gurgling in your chest—a man of his size, solid and mountainous, afraid of _spiders?_ —but Jonah has moved onto the next wonders, a rainbow of frogs and bizarre, bald-headed monkeys with scarlet faces, like hunched little old men wearing masks. 

So much in the world that you have not seen, that you will never see. You sip your brandy and listen to Jonah trying to tamp down on his natural enthusiasm to affect boredom instead, finding yourself more aggravated than you ought to be by it. He is all performance, of course, he always _has_ been, but the transparent affectation of pretending he is uninterested by all of the treasures he describes is utterly unnecessary in such close company. 

“You must be sad to be back in the rain,” Robert remarks and Jonah laughs, incredulous and condescending. 

“Oh, the _rain_ —come, now, this is hardly drizzle. You should have seen the rain, the _storms,_ Robert—lightning splitting the sky, and, oh, the swamps flooding; the trees there are accustomed to being half-drowned on most days of the year and have roots halfway up their trunks to accommodate it. Oh, and there were lynxes too, and parrots, and tortoises half as tall as a man, and—”

So it goes. Barnabas is entranced, of course, and Mordechai is content to let the lecture wash over him. Robert asks his questions and you sit and watch Jonah talk, the birdlike flutter of his hands, the candlelight glancing off his cheekbones and his temples. 

He’s lost weight. He ought to have grown tanned, you think, out there in the sun, but he looks almost bloodless, his veins stark and blue at his wrists and his temples. Later that night, you trace those veins with your lips and watch Jonah blossom under your touch, stretching towards your warmth, soaking up the contact. He basks in attention like a snake in the sun, like a cat, and you’re as exasperated by it as you are reluctantly fond.

You would never voice this to him, but it feels right to have him back home, cradled in the odd little circle that he has drawn around him. Never mind that it was Robert that first brought you all together. Ever since you laid eyes on him, ever since that first flush appeared on Barnabas’ cheeks and Mordechai’s eyes showed a glimmer of interest, it has always been Jonah that is your collective focal point. Barnabas strokes gentle fingers over his cheek, down his ribs, and Jonah watches with dark, glittering eyes, smiling lips pressed to the edge of his glass as he takes the worship that is his due. 

You ought to be appalled by it. Sometimes you are; sometimes you wonder whether you ought to loathe this gorgeous man, this sharp, callous little hellion that metes out tenderness only when he feels he will receive something better in return. He is capable of such cruelty, such generosity, and you find yourself urged to keep your distance, not to grow too close to him lest you become caught in the unforgiving riptide of his affections. For now, you watch him tilt his face towards Barnabas’ increasingly urgent kisses, blooming slow and easy until he and Barnabas are a tangled knot of limbs, scarcely aware of anybody else’s presence. 

If you wanted to, you could interrupt, could intervene, could involve yourself. You don’t, tonight. The brandy is sweet on your tongue, but not half as sweet as the soft sounds Barnabas makes. Times like these are the only ones in which Barnabas seems entirely unselfconscious, given over to all that Jonah can do to him, all that he can do to Jonah. It’s good to see him happy. He has been so wan and so lonesome lately, but each kiss Jonah gifts him seems to thaw him out a little. When he smiles at you, later, Jonah’s head on his chest, he looks almost like himself again. 

* * * 

It would be easy to get the impression that you spend most of your nights in Robert’s house, or Jonah’s, or Mordechai’s estate. The fact is, most of your correspondence with these odd and erudite men is via letter, and often weeks will go by when you scarcely see them at all. Mordechai, of course, is a reticent type. Robert spends more and more of his days choking on brickdust and thinking about tunnels. Barnabas is either with Jonah or keeping to himself, and Emiliano—he pops up at the oddest times, invited or not, and you’ve long-since given up trying to track his movements. 

And Jonah is wherever he wants to be. More often than not where there are books, or where there are people, and since your little office provides only a little of each, he only graces your surgery with his presence when he wants something. 

You are busy, busy, busy, your hands stained with blood or tinctures, plunged into wounds or tracing the sharp and definite edges of broken bones, pulling new life into the world, closing the eyelids of those who have left it. You work, you read, you write your letters and collapse into sleep for as long as you can for no doubt there will soon be a knock at your door— _the baby’s coming early_ —or— _the fever hasn’t broken, I fear he’s taken a turn for the worse_ —or— _she fell on her way downstairs and now she isn’t moving_ —or any other complaints that pull you from drowsiness and out into the cold. You are elbow deep in the world, rocked by tides of blood and grief and panic, snatching moments of peace wherever possible to catch your breath before you take the plunge again. 

You are a light sleeper by necessity, but even the heaviest of sleepers would have been roused by the pounding at your door. You pitch yourself out of bed before your eyes have properly opened, more or less clothed for exactly this eventuality, rubbing the remnants of sleep from your gritty, complaining eyes and throwing open the door onto a rainy street, fat drops splattering from the cobbles onto your bare feet, and Barnabas Bennett panting heavily, cheeks wet from the rain and—you think, from the redness of his eyes—with tears. 

For a moment, just one, you ache to draw him into your arms and soothe whatever has caused him such terror with kisses and soft words. But since sometimes you are a doctor first and a man second, you catch him firmly by the elbow to pull him out of the rain, sitting him down and setting a kettle on your little stove, hanging up his dripping coat and poking at the fire to pull it back from the brink, a flurry of motion that requires little thought. You’re caught up enough in the routine that it takes you until the fire is crackling and licking at the edges of a new log to turn back and notice that Barnabas has not yet spoken, is just trembling where you’ve placed him, eyes haunted, hands white-knuckled at his side. 

“I’m sorry,” he croaks finally when you set a cup of tea in front of him, rather thinking that perhaps you should have reached for whisky—Barnabas gulps at it, hissing as he no doubt scalds his tongue, but then gulps again, dragging in a ragged breath. “I don’t mean to... t-to disturb you, I—”

“Never mind that,” you sigh. You’re awake now, after all, and it can’t be long before dawn now anyway, so you’ll hardly get much more sleep tonight. “You look like you’ve been chased here by Satan himself. What on Earth is the matter?” 

It takes twenty minutes and another cup of tea to get any sense out of Barnabas. His teeth are chattering enough to make him nigh-incoherent even before his garbled, terrified speech can interfere, and he is afraid—he is so afraid—that once again you want to reach for him, to hush him and stroke his damp hair until he settles. You sit where you are, patient and steady, as the story comes out bit by bit. 

The facts, apparently, are thus: before he went abroad, Jonah had expressed considerable interest in botany. Hardly Barnabas’ area of expertise, but then neither is most of that which Jonah pursues, so he had no reason to complain. Fittingly for a man already given to rather macabre turns of thought, Jonah had pinned his interests on the poisonous, the rotten, the decaying. His shelves had filled rapidly with books featuring illustrations and unfamiliar words, _belladonna_ and _brugmansia_ and _syngliocladium._ And the philosophy of it, the questions, hearkening back to Robert’s fixations on balance—

 _They make life of death_ —so Jonah mused, so Barnabas tells you— _they take the stillness of the grave and transform it into burgeoning vitality._

“Was that why he travelled?” You ask softly when there’s a pause in Barnabas’ stuttering narration. “To further explore this new interest of his.” 

“Yes, and he—” Barnabas cuts himself off again, staring at his teacup like its contents might hold the answers to his odd, unspoken questions. 

More details trickle out, teased from him with probing questions and a patience you don’t really feel, too unsettled by the sight of Barnabas so terrified, scared enough to run to your door in the middle of the night. Jonah has been different since he returned from his travels, so Barnabas tells you. Drowsier, heavy-eyed, thinner; Barnabas fears for his health, he says, brow pinched in a frown. But Jonah reads and reads and reads, and scarcely sleeps, scarcely eats, and Barnabas hasn’t been able to do a thing to distract him—

Until tonight. Tonight, Barnabas had been allowed to take Jonah by the shoulders and guide him up from his desk, to draw him a bath and sit on the side of the tub, washing Jonah’s hair, smoothing his palms over his neck and his shoulders to work out the knotted muscles there. 

“The soap must have been new,” he mumbles, “it made Jonah’s skin feel—different. Waxy, almost, like I could press my thumbs in and in, like the impression of my hands would stay there.” 

Out of the bath and to bed, and Barnabas had showered Jonah with kisses, tracked each small, odd change in his body. The way his ribs were shadowed, just a little too dark to be down to weight-loss, like grey-green tiger-stripes over his side, like the gills of a fish. The sounds Jonah had made, half-choked like he was on the edge of tears, his eyes damp, the liquid falling from them not clear and salty but heavier, syrupy, pearling at the corners of his eyes like caramel, stretching like spun-sugar away from Barnabas’ wandering fingers. The pallor of his face, the way the inside of his mouth seemed paler too, drained of colour, white teeth against a pink-grey tongue, yielding when he kissed Barnabas—

And the kiss. The odd coolness of his lips, damp, like he’d just come in from the rain or from the thick, constant mist that shrouds Mordechai’s grounds. The taste of him, earthy and bitter like coffee, like soil, and the shudder of his sides under Barnabas’ palms as he gasped—seemed to convulse—and then exhaled hard against his lips. 

“It was like breathing in dust, or—or snow,” Barnabas says hoarsely, “but it was—it—it was like I’d run through a field of lilies. You know, that pollen that never quite comes out? I had it on my lips, on my cheeks, in my nose, I—look—” he draws a handkerchief from his pocket, studded with yellow like he’s soaked it in turmeric, fat beads of pollen glistening, still wet. “I ran,” Barnabas admits. “I threw on my clothes and ran, and I had to come to you because I think—I think that Jonah may be gravely ill, and I don’t know who else I can call upon to help.” 

This raises more questions than answers. You don’t know what to make of Barnabas’ account, only that it seems fragmented and uncertain. You promise that you will call on Jonah tomorrow, but that there’s nothing to be done at this time of night. In the meantime, since Barnabas’ pulse is steady and he isn’t feverish and he doesn’t seem to be wounded nor struggling for breath, you tell him that he ought to sleep. He puts up a token protest—that he doesn’t want to impose, that he couldn’t possibly—but it isn’t long before he’s tangled in your sheets, boots set neatly by the door, hair falling into his eyes as he shifts restlessly and nuzzles his cheek into the pillow. 

He looks so young like this. You oughtn’t watch him, you know—you ought to leave him to his rest. There are myriad tasks you could be doing. There are letters to be written, there are preparations to be made for the day, but you find yourself rooted to the floor watching the way Barnabas’ chest rises and falls, the shadows that his eyelashes cast onto his cheeks. Even in his sleep he looks lost. Your hand lingers over his shoulder, inches from tucking him in, from brushing his hair from his face. You withdraw it, fingers tingling with contact not given, not received, and retreat back downstairs. 

It is only a few hours before Jonah arrives. 

His knock at your door is steady, his gaze forthright as he smiles at you and bids you a good morning, casual as you please. Dumbfounded, all you can do is mutter a greeting back, falling back onto courtesy as questions crowd their way into your throat and leave you speechless, stepping aside to let Jonah in. 

“Is Barnabas here?” He asks, brushing his fingers over your little writing desk, eyeing the letters with naked, unabashed curiosity. 

You consider lying, but disregard it just as quickly. Nothing will happen to Barnabas while you are here—you will not let it, and pleading ignorance will not help you get to the bottom of whatever is going on. 

“He’s asleep,” you say, trying not to let judgement shade your tone and failing miserably. Jonah nods as if he’d expected as much, turning back to you with a sigh. 

“Good. He ran away in such a panic I couldn’t ask him where he was going, but I’m glad he found his way safely to you.” 

It’s the strangest thing. Even now, suspicious as you are after all that Barnabas has told you, you believe him. You really do believe he’s glad that Barnabas is safe. 

“What happened last night?” You ask, setting the kettle on the hob again and gesturing for Jonah to sit, watching him shrug his coat off to hang it on the back of a chair, hands folded neatly in his lap. Precise little motions, meticulous and neat. Sometimes it can feel as if Jonah has scripted every interaction he enjoys, and you’re only playing a part in whatever scene he’s written. You bite your tongue and reach to the side, where you’d left the honey earlier, knowing that Jonah—like Barnabas—favours his tea sweeter. 

“Opium,” Jonah replies simply, and without even a hint of shame. “I’m afraid Barnabas didn’t take well to it. He was babbling all sorts of nonsense that I couldn’t make head nor tail of—not that I was entirely in my right mind either—and he spent half the evening with his nose in the flowers that Emiliano sent me, don’t ask me why, but it made it very difficult for me to understand anything. I thought he was eating them, at one point. Anyway, he worked himself up into some panic or other and fled, and I wasn’t really in a state to chase after him, and—” he spreads his hands in a helpless little gesture, “here we are, I suppose. I’m just glad he’s safe.” 

It’s plausible. Plausible enough that your first thought is irritation at Barnabas for having interrupted your night for such a foolish reason, but—

Well, he hadn’t seemed out of his mind, had he? Not drowsy or detached from reality. He’d been steady enough on his feet, clear-eyed, if frightened, and you cannot help but feel suspicious, though it’s oddly muted, something else in your mind batting it down, tugging it aside. _Don’t worry. It’s all right._

“May I see him?” Jonah asks, taking the teacup you hand him, and you have no good reason to refuse him. No reason except the quiet discomfiting tug at your lungs, no reason except the memory of Barnabas’ pale face and his red-rimmed eyes and his handkerchief spotted with yellow. 

“Of course.” 

* * * 

Whatever your reservations might be, Barnabas is more easily convinced of Jonah’s tale than you are, and he leaves at his side with no end to the apologies for having disrupted your sleep, and assurances that he’s feeling much better now, thank you, bless you, goodbye, be well—and you have other patients to care for. Nonetheless, you keep your eye on Barnabas and Jonah, when you can. 

It’s made easier by the fact that they are rarely apart, these days. Jonah works, and works, and works, but when he’s out and about it’s with Barnabas at his side, their heads bent close over drinks, over cards, both of them laughing at some rakish comment from Emiliano, one of them on each side of Robert, cheeks pressed to his shoulders. 

And the more time passes the more you worry, you _worry_ , fear aching in the pit of your stomach and in your throat and keeping you from sleep again, but it’s entirely impotent. What can you do? Charge into Jonah’s house and demand the truth of him? Jonah holds his truths like cards, face-down at his chest and bidding them cautiously, and no rough interrogation will win them from him. 

Anyway, it’s nonsensical to worry, because Barnabas seems happier, these days. You listen tos him speaking to Mordechai, the bright jangling of his laughter against the rumble of Mordechai’s voice, and wonder how long it has been since you last heard him laugh. Throughout the evening he opens his arms to you, draws you close and kisses you, tasting of wine, of spun-sugar, of warmth, but at the end of the night he retreats upstairs with Jonah. 

The two of them seem rooted together, these days. No matter. You have no claim upon either of them, and even if you did, you think you would surrender anything for the bright, joyous look in Barnabas’ eyes, the way he lights up when Jonah leans into his side, the way that he can make Jonah laugh. And you have other worries, other patients, more pressing things with which to concern yourself than rich, foolish young men. 

Even if Jonah is laughing a little less, these days. Even if he does seem a little more weary. Even if Mordechai seems to be avoiding him for some obscure reason of his own.

You stand in the doorway of Emiliano’s house one night and watch Jonah and Barnabas step out onto the street together. It’s raining, the air blurred and softened by drizzle, the street cast in sodium-yellow and deep shadow and moonlight, and Jonah lifts a thin, ungloved hand to catch raindrops in his palm, tilting his face back into the drops. 

“I thought you hated the rain,” Barnabas remarks, laughing, standing by the door of Jonah’s carriage but waiting patiently in the damp for him to finish whatever odd little baptism he’s giving himself. 

“Oh, no,” Jonah sighs, an odd, dreamy quality to his voice—he must have drunk more than you’d realised—and you watch raindrops trickling over his skin, his closed eyelids, made syrupy by the lamplight and pearling on his outstretched fingers. “No, no.” His teeth gleam in the moonlight and he is luminous as if lit from within, immobile and beautiful like something preserved in amber.

* * * 

The next time you see Barnabas away from Jonah’s side he’s stretched out over your bed again, tangled in your sheets again, seeking sanctuary in your arms again. This time, you abandon your facade of professionalism and let him kiss you, feeling affection clamp itself around your heart and weigh down your tongue. It feels safer to have Barnabas here, even if he isn’t afraid this time, even if he is calm and serene and merry—you find yourself holding him tighter anyway. 

You can’t resist prodding at the wound. Not least because the reticence in voicing suspicion seems to have abandoned you, now, and you can’t imagine why you didn’t push back harder when Jonah came to collect Barnabas from your bed. You fight the urge to speak up all evening for the sake of courtesy, basking in Barnabas’ company and conversation for hours, setting your hand against the base of his spine to feel it when he shakes apart against you, but in the lassitude of those last, heavy moments before sleep, you turn your face against Barnabas’ neck and breathe in sweat and the earthy, wet smell of tea leaves. 

“I’m glad you and Jonah have resolved whatever happened between you,” you murmur casually—too casually—into the sharpness of Barnabas’ collarbone, feeling a surprised intake of breath flutter through him. 

“We—” he pauses, collects his breath, and the silence stretches vast and oppressive between you. “Sometimes I think that you and Jonah are the only people that could ever understand me.” 

Which is no answer. No answer at all. You wonder if Barnabas has included you there out of courtesy, but his hand is tight in your hair, his arm rooted around your waist, his legs tangled like vines against yours, and you cannot doubt his sincere intent to hold you and keep you here, even if you’re not entirely sure why. His hand comes up to rub gently at the bridge of your nose where your spectacles have dug into your skin and you can’t help but sigh, closing your eyes and tilting your face into his touch.

“I think we’re better when we’re together,” Barnabas murmurs into the silence you leave open, and you don’t know which of you he’s talking about. You don’t know what he means at all. 

* * * 

Jonah is growing paler. Jonah’s veins are more prominent at his wrists and his throat, and his freckles look more grey than brown, like ink-stains, like soot-marks, and Barnabas’ hair curls lustrously around his face, and his cheeks are flushed and his hands are strong, and he has never looked more beautiful. 

* * * 

When Barnabas enters the room where they’re playing cards, Jonah turns his head as if he’s scented him on the air, reaches for him to take his hand and draw him closer before anybody else can react. 

“How goes it?” Barnabas murmurs and Jonah smiles thinly, looking down at his cards and giving a diffident little shrug. 

“I think we ought to stop soon, else there’ll be no money left,” he sighs. “I can’t seem to keep the suits in my head today.”

“Well. Never mind. I’ll help.” Barnabas presses his lips to Jonah’s temple, and the skin there looks so fragile that you think it might break under his touch, might split Jonah open like a seed-casing. You can see the delicate webbing of veins over his skull made stark by the candlelight—when he lifts his hand to retrieve his drink, his palm looks latticed like a physalis leaf. “I’m sure we’ll manage between us, somehow.” 

“We, we—” Emiliano sighs, “like an old married couple, you two.” His tone is flippant but there’s something odd and sharp to it, and across the circle from you Mordechai watches from over his cards and says nothing. Both of them have their eyes fixed upon Barnabas. 

“Hardly,” Jonah laughs, and just for a moment, you see the shade of that incandescently beautiful young man that charmed you all mere weeks ago: the flash of his teeth, the heartstopping quality of his smile. “I’ll be a bachelor till I die, I’m sure of it. Why, my brother always said—”

He continues, his voice lilting and easy over the crackle of the fire, but you’ve stopped listening. You’ve stopped listening for the same reason that Mordechai’s fingers are still on his cards, and even Emiliano’s perpetual fidgeting has ceased. 

“You don’t have a brother.” Mordechai’s voice cuts through Jonah’s chatter like a death-knell, resonant and unforgiving, and Jonah stares at him with bewilderment, lips parted in surprise.

“I beg your pardon?” He says finally, his voice tight. 

“You don’t have a brother, Jonah.” The slam of the coffin lid, the punch of a ticket, the snap of ice.

He’s right. That’s the worst of it. Jonah is an only child, and watching realisation spread over Jonah’s face feels like watching someone’s head slip under dark water, rolling, nauseating—despite yourself, you want to reach for him. Barnabas does first, his hands sure and steady against his shoulders.

“Imagine,” Barnabas says softly, voice warm and ripe with good-humour, “I’ve told you my silly little stories so many times that you’ve started to think them your own. You have everyone else’s stories, angel, can’t I keep mine?” And he laughs, and Mordechai looks back to his cards, but you can’t look away from Jonah, pale-faced and tight-mouthed and held oh-so-gently between Barnabas’ warm hands. 

* * * 

The knock at the door is just as steady, but this time Jonah isn’t half so composed. He’s wild-eyed, half-stumbling into your grip when you reach for him, and you can feel his fingers digging blunt bruises into the flesh of your upper arm. 

“Jonah—”

“You must help me,” he whispers, trembling against you when you usher him inside and sit him down. “Jonathan, you must, I am—it wasn’t supposed to be this way—”

“Jonah, settle down,” you urge him, trying to soothe, to placate, but he struggles under your hands, tearing at his clothes like they are choking him, tugging his cravat free with no thought for the delicate silk under his fingers, digging his nails into the mother-of-pearl buttons when they don’t come free fast enough and tearing his waistcoat free. “Jonah!” You protest, shocked—not by his sudden state of déshabillé, but by the violence of his motions and the panic in his eyes. He’s panting, his chest rising and falling rapidly, and you can hear the rattle of his breath like a marble being shaken in a glass bottle, something trapped and desperate to be free. 

His shirt comes off, as do the binding undergarments beneath, and suddenly you have no more protestations, no more voice for him. 

Barnabas was right—it does look like gills. Feathered, frilled, lace-edged, sweeping along the cage of his ribs, shelves of flesh moving gently with the rise and fall of Jonah’s breath, waving like anemones swept by the tide, like antennae, like something questing and seeking. They’re grey, fading to purple and blue at their edges, like fingers gone bloodless with the chill, delicate and beautiful and sickening. 

And beneath the frills, in the space between his ribs once filled in with smooth skin, are damp, cavernous little spaces, dark and deep, the candlelight reflecting off the soft, burgeoning lumps of whatever is growing there, the droplets of whisky-gold caught against the edges and hanging there, suspended, like caramel. 

It’s the dull, clean gleam of bone that frightens you most. It’s not a rib, for those are covered by those bizarre frills—it lies beyond them, only glimpsed in brief moments behind softly shifting flesh. With a clench of horror you realise that what you’re seeing is the steady line of Jonah’s spine. No wonder he looks thinner. He’s almost hollowed out.

“What have you done?” You whisper, hoarse and horrified, watching Jonah cling to the edge of the table and stare back at you. “Jonah, _what have you done_?” Because nothing happens to Jonah unless he allows it, and his only obligations are to himself. 

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he repeats, his breath still shaking in his throat, the frills at his sides shivering like they have minds of their own. “I don’t want it to be like this.”

What did he want, then? What could have driven him to do this—whatever it is that he’s done? You think back to Barnabas, his handkerchief, the pollen in his nose and his throat, and a dawning, creeping terror grasps your lungs and freezes them still. 

“What have you done?” You ask for the third time, and Jonah tries to tell you. 

You can tell he’s trying because he seems to be fighting the words as they leave him, spitting them like sunflower seeds from between his teeth. He tells you about dark forests and humid swamps and the miles of hard-frozen land, and the things that live there, the cycle of life and decay and rot, the everlasting life that is to be born in something long-dead. The odd joy of feeling life bloom in his veins and his lungs, his body made a sanctuary, his voice becoming one of many that thrum through each cell, each breath. Becoming multitudinous, becoming _full_ , each part of him made useful and beautiful. 

There’s an ecstasy in how he describes seeing those first speckles of oddly dimpled skin; the first time Jonah dug his nails into his sides to pull his flesh aside in rough chunks and let these new parts of himself see the sun; the day that he _became_. The day he could blossom into something more. There’s a victory there. Whether or not he wants this now, you’re sure that he certainly wanted it then. 

And then, he says, with the blossoming came the urge to spread, to bring others into the fold, to feed what now depended upon him. Poor Barnabas was always so desperate to be part of something, he’d thought, and now he could be a part of something greater; now they could experience this together. Now he would never be alone again. 

You wonder if Jonah really believes that—that he did this for Barnabas’ sake rather than his own awful, insatiable curiosity. If not, you note numbly, he affects it well enough. 

“Is he—” you ask, and Jonah laughs, a horrid wrenching sound torn roughly from his aggrieved chest. 

“Oh, he’s taken to it beautifully. You ought to see him,” he whispers. “He gave himself over at once, and now he’s more a host than I am—a cultivator where I have turned to soil.” 

The words strike you like a physical blow and you grasp clumsily for the back of a chair, settling down before your knees buckle beneath you, staring at Jonah with your hands clenched tight and placed in front of your mouth. Your arm hurts where Jonah has grabbed it—you can feel your pulse thudding in the forming bruises—and all you can think of is the steady thump of life in a womb, the pulse of Barnabas’ heart against your ear, something once lost, never retrieved. 

He’s more a host than Jonah is. Perhaps that makes sense. Barnabas would fall into anything that would have him—he loves without question, without reservation. Maybe amongst mushrooms, there are no first among equals. Barnabas could never be anything but bolstered by love, by the feeling of something else needing him, but Jonah’s obligations are to himself, so why should he care if he is needed? Perhaps that’s why he is being consumed instead.

It’s all that he deserves, as the one who sought it out, as the one who inflicted this horror upon Barnabas, but you think of his haunted face and those dark holes within his torso and feel nauseated by helpless pity, by impotent terror.

“The two of you haven’t been apart lately,” you say finally, and Jonah chews his lower lip fretfully, nodding. Under his teeth the indented, bloodless skin takes a while to spring back—waxlike, just as Barnabas had said. 

“It’s difficult. We—we—”

 _We_ again. And you’re about to inquire further, but there’s another knock at the door, steady and unhurried. Jonah stifles what sounds like a sob and you hasten to him, wrapping his coat back around his shoulders at least and ushering him towards the stairs before opening the door again. 

You can’t even pretend to be surprised to see Barnabas. Even in the half-light of dusk he all but glows with health, his eyes warm and fond as he looks at you. 

“Doctor,” he greets you tenderly and reaches for your hand. You let him, if only to examine his skin for yourself—unmarked, save for a freckle at the inside of his thumb—and to feel the warmth of blood beneath his palm, the steady heartbeat at his wrist. “May I see Jonah?” 

“What makes you think that Jonah is here?” You retort, summoning what little composure you can muster to straighten your spine and look him in the eye. He just looks back at you, his expression almost pitying. When has Barnabas Bennett ever been in a position to pity you? 

You step back—whether to let him in or to close the door in his face you’re not quite sure, but Barnabas steps neatly in with a graceful little turn that seems quite unlike him, slipping indoors and shrugging off his coat as if this were any other social call. 

“Can you help him?” You ask, remembering Barnabas crumpled at your table, reaching for your hands in supplication, remembering him held close in your bed. 

“It’s better like this,” Barnabas replies softly, with such warmth and earnestness that for a moment, you almost believe him. “If he’d only stop fighting it, he’d see—and he understands, I know he does. Jonathan, you know how I feel about Jonah. Do you really think I could ever do anything to hurt him?” 

“He’s wasting away,” you protest weakly, and Barnabas lifts one shoulder in a thoroughly unsettling little shrug. Easy, confident. How far has he come from the man who stood lost in Robert’s sitting room, quite out of place without Jonah’s hand to guide him? At what cost this grace, this contentment? 

“Are you much of a gardener? Good plots rarely die, though they might change quite dramatically. We’re not going anywhere. And more to the point, this cannot be undone without costing Jonah’s life, Doctor, so I really would urge you to leave well enough alone. He’ll never die, like this. We’ll never die, like this.” He smiles at you beatifically, and once again you find yourself believing him, quite against your better judgement. He has every reason to lie to you, but you don’t think he is—he really does believe that this is for the best. He truly believes that there is no alternative. 

You could reach for your scalpel, now, if you chose. You could try to fight Barnabas. You could spirit one or both, of them away, try to cure them of what ails them, but you already know that—at least where Jonah is concerned—this is beyond your power. Whatever forces have conspired to fill Jonah with such inhuman horrors, there is scarcely enough of him left to cut out what ails him and leave a body behind. And as for Barnabas—as for Barnabas—

“Jonathan,” he sighs, reaching for your hand again. “I wish I could show you. I wish I could make you understand how good it feels to be part of something greater than yourself. Every pain I ever felt, each gap, each worry—it’s gone, all of it.” 

It is a religious fervour, the light in his eyes. He is so hale and so beautiful, and he hasn’t looked so happy and whole for as far back as you can remember. 

“What will happen to you both?” 

“We’ll be alright,” Barnabas murmurs. “We’ll keep each other safe and whole. I’ll take care of Jonah, and we’ll grow together.” 

“You’ll spread. Like Jonah did to you,” you reply dully. And if that’s the case, then you have a duty. This knowledge you are saddled with gives you obligations. You cannot let anyone else be beholden to this, be hollowed and consumed for the sake of a kiss, and lose themselves the way Jonah seems to be losing himself. You have a duty to your patients, and you have a duty to the lives you can affect, even if that no longer includes Jonah. There is a scalpel behind you, a bone saw. You think you could overpower Barnabas if you needed to.

Barnabas looks—hurt. There’s a flicker of uncertainty there, a man stepping into the empty air, missing a step, afraid that nothing is there to catch him. It resolves itself soon enough, and there’s a hint of Jonah in the way he smiles and tilts his head like he’s never had any other reaction in mind. 

“No,” he says simply. “No, that was Jonah’s urge, not mine—we’re finished here. I think it’s best that we grow, and if we’re to do that, better that we do it somewhere quiet. Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to come with us.” 

But there’s such a longing in his voice, as resonant as Mordechai’s laughter, as fervent as Jonah when he speaks. It pulls for you, and you almost want to let it. Wouldn’t it be a relief to settle into being nothing more than what you are, and to know that that is enough? To sleep easy without the demands of anything on your mind other than to live, to breathe, to grow? To settle into the warmth of the earth and turn your face towards the sun, catch raindrops on your hand and press your body to Barnabas’, to Jonah’s, to be _whole_? 

“No. You won’t,” you agree. “And I won’t let you take Jonah without his agreement.” 

There’s that pity in his eyes again. Barnabas looks towards the stairs without prompting and Jonah’s eyes gleam wetly out of the shadows, thin frame huddled into his coat. 

“Of course we agree,” Jonah says softly, and he sounds just like Barnabas as he used to be, shy and lovesick and tender. “It’s better this way. It’s better when we’re together.” 

His steps are faltering. You have never seen Jonah this unsteady before, but the moment his hand touches Barnabas’ he steadies himself, tension leaking from his shoulders as he lets himself fall against Barnabas’ chest, nuzzling into his neck like he fits there. Barnabas will smell like sweat, you know, and tea-leaves. 

“There we are, angel,” Barnabas whispers, and closes his arms around him, folds him in his limbs as tight as the petals on a bud and closes them both off to you. 

Jonah re-dresses, and you watch him piece himself together. Fully-clothed, he almost looks himself again, but his hands only leave Barnabas’ when the process of dressing necessitates it, their fingers tangled together at all times otherwise, Jonah leaning into Barnabas’ side, Barnabas’ head tilted towards Jonah’s. 

You let them go. What else can you do? 

* * * 

Neither Mordechai nor Emiliano ever ask you where they went. You remember that. Robert asks after them, aggrieved and concerned by their sudden absence, and when Emiliano makes some quip about eloping you long to snap his neck for it. How wrong he is. How right he is. You hate them all for how easily they let Jonah and Barnabas go. You hate yourself for just the same. 

Sometimes you can still feel Barnabas’ arms around you, the curve of his smile against your cheek and his fingers in your hair. Sometimes you can still hear Jonah’s laugh, the arch little lilt he affected when he was about to make a joke and was preparing the whole room to laugh with him. 

The work is never over, of course, and you are still plunged to your shoulder in the viscera and the pulsing, scarlet mess of the world, births and deaths, births and deaths, the tragedies and injustices and comeuppances that the world metes out on its inhabitants, fighting a rising tide, ameliorating what you cannot help, quieting what you cannot heal.

You wake with the dawn, and you hold to your simple pleasures, and it is a full three years before you reach for your letters and your atlas and—most of all—the whisper that sits behind your left ear, the hum in your chest when it’s quietest. Like tinnitus, always there in the background, rarely heard unless the night is still, unless the patients have left and you are without work and you have a moment to listen. 

_Wouldn’t it be nice to rest, and be whole, and only have to be what you are? Wouldn’t it be nice to sleep easy, for a change? Aren’t things better when we’re all together?_

And in the end, it doesn’t take much searching in the atlas. You know where you will be going, just as Barnabas and Jonah always knew where to find one another. 

The Black Forest is cold at this time of year, but it feels warmer the further in you go, leaving Albrecht and his polite questions behind you along with the horses and watching the stark, skeletal trees against the sky give way to springing moss and the tense silence before a pounce; the held breath of a predator making no sound at all. 

It’s an impossible route, you’re sure—you pass the same tree twice, skirt the edge of a stream that you’ve crossed and double-crossed and crossed again—but then, there you are. And there they are, glowing as if lit by the starlight, casting a faint light around them. Barnabas is sitting by the water’s edge with his fingers pressed against the half-iced water, still flushed and rosy where he ought to be bloodless and chilled. He looks like he belongs here, moss overgrowing his shoulders like a cloak, down onto the forest floor, delicate lines of ghost-white mushrooms strung like pearls over his brow. 

And leaning against his side, Jonah: the high sweep of his cheekbone and his sunken temple, and the darkness where his eye socket has collapsed under the weight of the mushrooms frothing and overflowing from within his skull, the rise and fall of his thin chest and the frond-like gills over his side waving in the chilled air. What skin he has left is latticed, like he’s made from gossamer or fine lace, and when he reaches out to you with wraithlike fingers you watch spores stream forth from him like dust-motes caught in sunlight, silvery ripples in the air misting towards you faster than you can react. You ought to cough, to choke, to clamp a handkerchief to your nose and flee. 

You don’t. The air is clean and cold within your lungs, and Barnabas’ arms are tender and secure around your shoulders, and already you can feel sleep weighing your eyes. You’ll rest well, tonight.

“You came,” Barnabas murmurs, and he sounds so tender that you could weep. “Oh, Jonathan. We’re so glad.” 


End file.
